This is a forum of anti-Islamic activists who are trying to find practicable solution to the explosive growth of Muslim population in the West. Some activists also try to find practicable solutions to other global problems.

In the middle ages the most pious Christians were pilgrims who travelled to the tomb of Jesus. The tomb was located in Israel. At that time Israel was occupied by Muslim invaders who abused or even killed the pilgrims. The purpose of the Crusades was liberating the tomb of Jesus to protect the pilgrims. Muslims perceived the Crusades as minor nuisance - they waged much bigger wars at the same time. The Muslims expelled the Crusaders when the Crusaders made a mistake of venturing too far from the tomb of Jesus.

The first call for a crusade occurred in 846 CE, when an Arab expedition to Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter's [Basilica] in Rome... The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad – an attempt to recover by holy war what was lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up. source: http://tinyurl.com/nahwof

"The Crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world... The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy... If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn’t they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades." - historian Thomas Madden, source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/220747/crusade-propaganda/thomas-f-madden

All the Crusades met the very criteria of the just wars... They came about in reaction to attacks against Christians or the Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 to defend against the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor as well as the earlier Arab conquest of what until then had been the Christian Holy Land. The second Crusade developed as a response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third resulted from the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and a number of other Christian lands in 1187. In each case, Christians went to war to defend Christians, to combat the attackers, and to rectify egregious wrongs. source: The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam by Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, http://townhall.com/columnists/AllenHunt/2009/12/14/have_yourself_a_very_jihad_christmas

Saladin's army decisively defeated the Crusaders at Hattin, ultimately making possible the capture of Jerusalem by Muslim forces. After his impressive victory over the out-numbered, out-generaled Crusaders, Saladin singled out for special treatment the approximate 230 Knights Templar and Hospitallers who had surrendered. With religious ritual, Saladin choreographed the mass execution of these prisoners of war. He even ordered each cleric in his army personally to behead at least one knight. Only a few prisoners saved themselves by "converting" to Islam. source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3767/beheading-koran

The Crusades were proclaimed not only against Muslims, but also against many groups, and communities that the Catholic Church considered heretical, and enemies of the faith, groups such as the pagan Wends, Balts and Lithuanians, shamanist Mongols, Orthodox Russians and Greeks, Cathar and Hussite heretics... the Crusaders were not extremists or barbarians indulging in thoughtless violence, rather the underlying rationale of the Crusades was relatively sophisticated, elabo­rated theologically by Christian nations that were threatened by Muslim invaders who had managed to reach into the heart of Europe, in central France in the eighth century. The Crusades were a response to the desecration of the Christian shrines in the Holy Land, the destruction of churches, and the general persecution of Christians in the Near East. A Crusade to be considered legitimate had to fulfill strict criteria; one did not enter into it lightly for self aggrandizement. There had to be a legally sound reason. It was, in other words, waged for purposes of repelling violence or injury and the imposition of justice on wrongdoers. A Crusade was never a war of conversion, rather a rightful attempt to recover Christian territory which had been injuriously seized in the past. Only a recognized authority could formally declare a Crusade, and it had to be waged justly. The Crusaders were not colonialists, and the Crusades were not en­gaged in for economic reasons, as many Western Liberals and Liberal econ­omists assumed; most crusaders would have laughed at the prospect of material gain. In fact, crusading became a financial burden as the expenses associated with warfare increased. They were far more concerned with sav­ing not only Christendom from Islam, but also their souls. The role of pen­ance has often been overlooked in crusading thought and practice; many crusaders believed that by taking part in a crusade they were able to repay the debt their sinfulness had incurred... The Muslim persecution of Christians, or for that matter, all non-Muslims, varied from country to country, ruler to ruler, or century to cen­tury. Here I can only adumbrate the situation in the Holy Land a hundred years before Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for a crusade to liberate Palestine. The cruelties of Caliph al-Hakim have been recorded by Christian and Muslim historians. In 1003, al-Hakim began the persecution of Jews and Christians in earnest. Historian Ibn al-Dawadari tells us that the first move in a series of acts was the destruc­tion of the church of St. Mark. Al-Musabbihi, a contemporary, recounts that the Christians built this church without a permit—the building of new churches was not permitted. The Al-Rashida mosque was built in its place, eventually extending over, and desecrating Jewish and Christian cemeteries; surely an act of vandalism. The height of al-Hakim’s cruelties was the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also known as the Church of the Resurrection, possibly the most revered shrine in Christendom, since it is considered by Christians as Golgotha, (the Hill of Calvary), where the New Testament says that Jesus was crucified, and even the place where Jesus was buried, and hence, of course, the site of the Resurrection. He ordered dismantled “the Church of the Resurrection to its very foundations, apart from what could not be destroyed or pulled up, and they also destroyed the Golgotha and the Church of St. Constantine and all that they contained, as well as all the sacred grave-stones. They even tried to dig up the graves and wipe out all traces of their existence. Indeed they broke up and uprooted most of them. They also laid waste to a con­vent in the neighbourhood….The authorities took all the other property belonging to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its pious foundations, and all its furnishings and treasures.” According to Muslim sources the destruction began in September, 1007 C.E. “Most of the Muslim sources view the destruction as a reaction to its magnificence and the fact that it was a world centre for Christian pilgrims, among them many Christians from Egypt; to the splendid processions that were held in the streets of Jerusalem, and to the ‘Paschal fire’”... Many believe that modern Muslims have inherited from their me­dieval ancestors memories of crusader violence and destruction. But nothing could be further from the truth. By the four­teenth century, in the Islamic world the Crusades had almost passed out of mind. Muslims had lost interest, and, in any case, they “looked back on the Crusades with indifference and complacency. In their eyes they had been the outright winners. They had driven the crusaders from the lands they had settled in the Levant and had been triumphant in the Balkans, occupying far more territory in Europe than the Western settlers had ever held in Syria and Palestine.” The Muslim world only began to take an interest in the Crusades again in the 1890s but seen through the prism of Western imperialist rhetoric and European romantic fantasies concocted by Walter Scott. The latter encouraged the myth of the culturally inferior crusaders faced with civilized, liberal, and modern-looking Muslims, and from the former the Muslims derived the equally false idea of a continuing Western assault. Many Arab Nationalists believed “their struggle for independence to be a predominantly Arab riposte to a crusade that was being waged against them. Since the 1970s, however, they have been challenged by a renewed and militant Pan-Islamism, the adherents of which have globalized the Nationalist interpretation of crusade history.”... The Islamic countries, in general, and Arab ones in particular, are failures in every way possible... These failures are unbearable for the Arabs whose only explanation for them is the one that they have been taught over the last seventy five years by intellectuals and frauds like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, namely, Western imperialism and colonialism, seen as a continuation of the Crusades. Victimhood is exploited to the maximum to blackmail Western nations into giving economic aid, and eases the guilty consciences of the Arabs themselves: it is not their fault that they are such abject failures- it is all the fault of the Crusaders. It is the only way they are able to live with themselves and their moral, intellectual, and economic defeats. At the same time, invoking the Crusades reminds the Arabs of their past triumphs when they succeeded in routing the Crusades at, for example, the Battle of Hattin [1187]. - Ibn Warraq, source: http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/142208/sec_id/142208

What we must make clear about the templars is that they weren't that cruel, bloodthirsty organisation as which it is seen from today's traditional point of view. They were just an ordinary military-religious order. In fact it was the french king who initiated the lies about the templars to be cruel, bloodthirsty, even to worship the devil, etc. to have a reason to forbid them, so he can get all their money. The templars were exorbitantly rich and the french king just needed money.